If the Twin Cities has an answer to the literate, charmingly tuneful pop songcraft of Belle And Sebastian, or the Kinks songs that populate Wes Anderson movie soundtracks, it’s surely Walker Kong, which enlivened the Minnesota music scene with four albums of breezy indie-rock in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The band took a …
“I always loved the idea that music is something to cast a curse with.” Originally published in The A.V. Club’s Twin Cities edition, August 14, 2009. It’s no longer online there, so I’ve published it here. Over the course of three full-length albums and a smattering of EPs since 2006, Twin Cities quartet Vampire Hands has perfected …
Photo of Michael Yonkers courtesy the artist. Note: A shorter version of this interview was published in The A.V. Club’s Twin Cities print edition, August 31, 2007. This version, which appears online here for the first time, was re-edited and expanded in August 2023 with extra material that was too long for the original space …
Duluth trio Low has been tagged as “that slow, quiet band” for most of its 14-year career, but that’s only part of the story. On recent albums like 2005’s The Great Destroyer and the new Drums And Guns, Low has found ways to capture a bigger, denser sound without sacrificing a minimalist ethic. The A.V. Club spoke with singer-guitarist Alan Sparhawk, …
MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and novelist Jonathan Lethem ignores the boundary between literary fiction and “lower” pop-culture or genre work, drawing inspiration from Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and comics. Lethem stayed mostly in science-fiction territory in early novels like Gun, With Occasional Music, and found wider success with 1999’s National Book Critic’s Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, about …
Crime novelist Donald Westlake is a man of many aliases—Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, pseudonyms picked up over the course of 100-odd published books—but two names stand out, his own and Richard Stark. As Westlake, he mostly writes comic caper novels, notably his half-dozen books about luckless criminal John Dortmunder. As Stark, he’s created …
Stop-motion animation has been around since the silent-movie days, but no one has put a personal stamp on the technique like Ray Harryhausen. In 16 movies from 1949’s Mighty Joe Young to 1981’s Clash Of The Titans, Harryhausen gave life to an entire zoo’s worth of fearsome monsters, including the giant octopus which destroys the …